Online technology magazine, Ars Technica has a big, detailed article on what it took to install a municipal, open-access fiber optic network of the sort Google is proposing. If you think wiring an American city is a challenge, think about old, crowded European cities. No room for wiring cabinets in the streets, gobs of historical architecture not allowed to run cable in the air on poles (they don’t exist and aren’t allowed) and so on.
The article is kind of tech-heavy but its still a good read to get a handle on the organizational challenges. One of the biggest ones is, what to do when you get the fiber to the house? That’s actually the start of a whole nest of different problems.